Time for a new desk top PC, recommendations please

[Broadback]

As the subject. any ideas will be welcomed

[Clive Arthur]

Solid state drive is good. Use a 4K TV as monitor.

Cheers

[Brian Gaff]

Depends what you want to do with it really. Most of them are full of crudware, so you usually end up paying more from a small maker locally to get just exactly what software you need instead of a drive full of crapware. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

I have several of those here.

Maybe a Mac?

If you buy the correct one you can run windows as well. Brian

[Adrian Caspersz]

RGB lighting ...

[Bert Coules]

My current desktop PC came from P C Specialist:

They built to my exact specification and the machine has proved entirely reliable and satisfactory. I'd recommend them.

[whisky-dave]

The correct one, well they can all run windows, but you may have to buy W10 or whatever.

I've heard (no pun intended) that the Macs voice over is quite good.

But as I've never had to use it I can't really comment.

We've bought 96 PCs for the lab all-in-one that seem quite good value, similar to an iMac but less than half the price and as you won't be seeing the display so you won't need retina or even 4K. The only accurate thing I know about ours is that the weight is 12KG

[newshound]

Unanswerable without knowing what you want it for.

Do you have one at the moment? How much of it is re-useable (e.g. keyboard, monitor?). Can it be upgraded?

As a general suggestion I'd say get an SSD at least for the system drive.

Best "bang for the buck" without a doubt will come from a reconditioned business machine (box only). I've had several Dells, currently on a Precision 490 which is getting on a bit now. Spend what you save over a "new" one on one (or more) decent monitors and/or big SSDs.

[RJH]

Look to be about the same price as an iMac to me.

OptiPlex 7460 All-in-One £939

21.5" iMac 2.3GHz Processor 1TB Storage £1049

[whisky-dave]

yes I forgot we got them for about £750 each and with SSDs and 16GB of memory with an i7 .

Of course the Macs are only 21.5" compared to 24" .

I'm not sure how much bloatware they have as they'll just be reformated and the OS's added from scatch via a server.

[John Rumm]

Don't be silly.

[John Rumm]

What spec do you currently have?

What are you going to use it for?

What areas of performance in particular are you hoping to improve?

What is the budget?

[Martin Brown]

How old is the system being replaced and what CPU/ram/disk does it have?

These days desktops are somewhat out of favour. But capable ones can be had second hand refurbished for under £300.

If you want to do anything exotic like 4k video editing then you need to say so. If it is just for word processing than almost anything will do.

[spuorgelgoog]

If it's just for general use, an ex-corporate Dell or HP from Microdream, Tier1online or Morgan. As they use an Authorised Refurbisher install of Win10 they don't have much bloatware.

SSD for the O/S drive and 8 GB RAM.

Owain

[Tim Streater]

Not here they're not.

[Bob Eager]

Or here. We have six in use at home.

[Brian Gaff]

Yes I used Quiet PC for the same reasons. It is more expensive as it needed to be quiet, but generally its been fine. And use an ssd main drive.

Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Yes indeed but I'd not entertain any machine with less than 8 gig of ram, at least a four core processor and a hard drive of 1tb in addition to the ssd for the operating system. It all does depend so much on needs these days. Don't do what our council has and try to run their operation on Google chrome books and then wonder why its crap! Brian

[Martin Brown]

+1 Although there are some cheap and nasty ones there too.

For a power user perhaps. Win10 now boots fast enough that only the most impatient casual user will be inconvenienced and it will run OK in 4GB.

Obviously dedicated gamers would never be satisfied with Intel Graphics but if you only want 2D graphics and limited 3D support a PC with no graphics card then using the CPU built in capability uses a heck of a lot less power than one with a dedicated gamers graphics card.

[Bob Eager]

I agree. Not that I run Windows - it's FreeBSD here.

I ran quite happily with a 4 core CPU and 4GB (in 32 bit mode, so really

3.4GB). I now have several TB of disk (in RAID 1). I recently moved to 64 bit (finally!) and use 16GB. Most of the time I use about 5GB of that, and the rest is on a swap-backed RAM disk which is used for everyday large temporary files. The system rarely swaps.

I've not seen the need for an SSD as it boots really fast (but boots rarely). The last time I rebooted was a couple of weeks ago, when we had an extended power cut. Happy to have an SSD in the laptop, but otherwise I see no need.